A cough from the doorway startled us both. The woman from the front desk gave an apologetic laugh. “I didn’t mean to scare you, but it’s six, Cady. I need to leave. Will you lock up?”

“Good grief, we’ve been talking our heads off in here, Melanie. I didn’t even hear you come in. Sorry! You go on, but we’re leaving now, too.”

She leaned across me to pull the microfiche from the reader. She fiddled with the plastic sheet, waiting until we heard Melanie’s footsteps heading down the hall, and then said shyly, “Maybe you could come over to the house with me, talk to Gram. She might say more to you than she does to me. Maybe she did know Emerald Ferring but didn’t want to talk about her.”

10
What Big Teeth You Have

And so I ended up on Gertrude Perec’s front porch, watching moonlight shimmer on the slice of river we could see from her house. I don’t know how Cady had advertised my visit or how her grandmother had reacted, since I’d been following in my own car, but the elder Perec didn’t treat me like visiting royalty.

“Gram, it’s dark and getting chilly. Shouldn’t we go inside?” Cady had asked when her grandmother greeted me on the porch stairs.

Gertrude Perec said with a thin smile that it was a pleasant evening. “It will be winter soon enough, when we’ll all be longing for an evening like this where we can sit outside without three sweaters and our down coats.”

She hadn’t been overtly rude—she told me to make myself comfortable in one of the wicker porch chairs—but she didn’t offer anything to drink: I wasn’t supposed to stay. And Peppy was to remain in the car, an edict that startled her granddaughter.

“Gram! You let Melanie bring in that terrier of hers, and it pees in the corners.”

That was the first time in our conversation that Gertrude squeezed her granddaughter’s shoulder in a kind of warning.

It was Cady who took a bowl of water out to Peppy; she also brought me a glass of white wine to go with the one she was drinking herself.

While Cady was inside dealing with Peppy’s and my refreshments, Gertrude said, “Cady tells me you want to talk about that damned commune out by the Kanwaka silo.”

“No, ma’am,” I said, my voice neutral. “I’m trying to find Emerald Ferring. We came across a news story that Emerald was part of one of the protests out there, and I hoped you might have known her or her mother, since they’d lived here for quite a long time. As you have yourself.”